"Kelly,_James_Patrick_-_St._Theresa_of_the_Aliens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

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St. Theresa of the Aliens
by James Patrick Kelly
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Copyright (c)1984 James Patrick Kelly
First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1984

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction
Nebula Award Nominee

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So now they want to make her a saint. Her cult is spreading. Cures are claimed. The Purgers are taking over the Church; they want one of their own to be the first saint of the new century. The Congregation of Rites in Rome has named an advocate of the cause to prepare a brief for her sanctity. He has already asked me for an interview. I would rather talk to the promoter of the faith. The priest they call the devil's advocate.
Terry Burelli -- Theresa to the mythmakers -- did not have many friends while she was alive. I think it was because she was such a sad person. What I remember most about her is the sigh. She had no need of words to sum up her view of life. The sigh was enough. Even when she smiled it was as if she were expecting a disappointment. I never heard her laugh out loud; maybe she regarded humor as an occasion of sin. When she spoke in her soft, sighing voice people worried she was about to cry. Then she would shock them with her ferocious opinions.
My wife was her first cousin. When I met Nicole, she and Terry were roommates at St. Mary's College. I thought them an unlikely pair; at the time they seemed very different. Although both were attractive, Terry's beauty was cool and sterile; she was about as watchable as a plaster Virgin. Nicole and I would spend hours just looking at each other in wondrous silence. Both women were small-town Catholics, yet while Nicole was fascinated by the great world that the Church never mentioned, Terry was already building psychic walls to protect herself from it. Terry was a politician; she became chairperson of the local right-to-life chapter, forced the administration to blackout all X-rated movies ordered from telelink by the film club, and helped to set up a student-run soup kitchen in South Bend's slum. She dragged Nicole and me out of our apathy on occasion, although we much preferred being alone with each other to promoting her causes.
I wanted Nicole so much that I convinced myself that she was nothing like her dour cousin. We were in love; I thought that was enough to make a successful marriage. After school, we moved to Wynnewood, a suburb of Philadelphia, and each of us found interesting work. I became a staff writer and then an editor for InfoLine, one of the information utilities on telelink. Often as not I worked from my home terminal and had supper ready for Nicole when she came home from her job teaching history at Lower Marion High School. Our world was very small; it included just the two of us. We watched a lot of telelink and smoked hybrid pot that we grew ourselves and planted flower gardens and played pacball and drank daiquiris in video bars; all the soothing frivolities of life that people like Terry had no use for. It seemed to both of us that we were happy.
But Terry would not leave us alone. Our affluence offended her, although she was not at all shy about asking for money for her causes. Our indifference offended her more. She visited often and insisted on giving us her "reports from the real world," as she called them, tales of hunger and decadence and corruption. I can see her now, sitting on the modular couch in our living room, holding forth with quiet intensity about some misfit whose soul she coveted for the Lord.
"Thirteen years old." She would rub the crucifix hanging around her neck with thumb and forefinger. "She earns two hundred dollars a night and she needs every cent of it to pay for screamers. The only adults she knows are the johns; her only god comes out of a needle. And they call it a victimless crime. Your senator is cosponsoring the bill, Sam. You're in telelink; can't you do anything?"
Somehow, it was always my fault. By this time Nicole would have been spiritually battered into a corner of the couch. She would clutch knees to chest and nod, nod, nod, eyes blank. My best move would be to steer the conversation onto a more cheery topic. "What ever happened to so-and-so?" I would say, or "What should we watch tonight?" or "Where should we go for supper?" I did not mind sounding like a fool; I thought I was protecting Nicole.
Often as not Terry would ignore these gambits and continue on with her condemnations of the monsters who had inflicted modern civilization on the world. Once, though, she turned on me in a fury. "Sam, don't you realize that you could get in your fancy car right now, drive downtown and find people starving? What difference does it make to them if you can't order the Marx Brothers on the goddamned telelink?"
"People are born to die." I should have realized when she took the Lord's name in vain that she was out of control. I should have excused myself and spent a few minutes in the bathroom washing my hands. I did not. "God made them that way," I said.
She sighed. It was a sigh that acknowledged that I was the enemy but because God commanded it she would forgive me.
I did not much care to be condescended to in my own living room. "Everything is so simple, isn't it? If only the immoral louts like me would wake up and see the light. If only we would stop writing news, building cities, designing new computers. If only we would tear it all down and bring back the Middle Ages so that everybody in the world was Catholic and wretched together. Solidarity of misery, that's the ticket! Then maybe we could all pray and God would take care of us like he takes care of the birds of the air or the lilies ..."
"Shut up, Sam." Nicole sounded frightened. "You're drunk."
In fact, I had only had three glasses of wine but she was right. I was intoxicated with bitterness, high on blasphemy. Like many lapsed Catholics I had a kind of philosophical blood lust for the delusions of the faithful. Still, I had only been trying to protect Nicole and for my efforts had earned her rebuke. I was furious.
"Maybe you two would like to get down on your knees and pray for me? You'll excuse me if I don't stick around to watch. I'm afraid I might throw up." I thought I saw a smile tugging at Terry's perpetual frown; I was so mad I wanted to hit her. Instead I grabbed the half-empty bottle of Pocono riesling and retreated to the telelink room.
The Catholic Church has no answer to the problem of evil, therefore I cannot possibly ... Oh, screw the problem of evil. Screw all the dusty ideas, the dry arguments for and against. There is no single moment when you lose your faith; it crumbles under a series of little shocks. An alcoholic priest preaches the "just war" doctrine from the Sunday pulpit. Your friend dies of leukemia and God pays no attention. A well-meaning nun tells you that thinking about sex is a sin. You realize the unspeakable cruelty of an eternal Hell. You read the Bible and then you look at the Church men have made from it. I lost my faith when I no longer needed ideas to comfort me. I had Nicole.
I remember that Nicole and I made love that night. Afterward, I tried to apologize for losing my temper. She hushed me. "It's all right, Sam," she said. "I understand. She scares me too."
* * * *
That was just about the time that the aliens landed in Sverdlovsk.
It is hard now, after all that has happened, to remember how we all felt when we first heard the news. For years popular culture had prophesied the coming of aliens. Despite all the dark visions of monsters and cruel galactic empires, I think for the most part we longed to meet another intelligent species. We hoped they would answer all our questions, solve all our problems. As Nicole said, we were looking for a shortcut to paradise. We were the new Israelites, waiting for messiahs from space.
None of us expected that the messiahs would be communists. That was, I think, the hardest thing of all to accept. Not only had the aliens chosen to land in the U.S.S.R., but they actually called themselves communists. It was, they said, the best translation of their own name for themselves. Of course, the name has never really caught on in this country; we are still calling them "the aliens." A barely civil name. A name that neatly summarizes our attitude toward them.
Despite what you hear, the aliens do not think much of Marx and Engels and they are only mildly sympathetic to Lenin. Yes, they hold all property in common, their economy is planned, they live in collectives. They do not expect their world state to wither away however, and they are by no means revolutionaries. You have only to look at their record since landing to see that they mean to change us by example, not by force. But still the preachers rail and the politicians lecture and the people do not understand.
It was six months after Sverdlovsk before they even bothered to visit the United States. I had the honor, if you can call it that, of representing InfoLine at the first English-language press conference ever given by an alien. Of course, no one has ever really seen an alien since they never come out of their bullet-shaped jump ships. The squat hairless monkeys that they call their "bodies" are in fact remotely-controlled mechanisms. The aliens fear the the hostility of the earth's environment and its inhabitants. I have seen and even talked to these "bodies"; like most people I accept the mechanism and rarely think about the mysterious and distant alien controlling it.
As an historic disaster, that press conference has been studied and restudied. Yet to this day I have difficulty remembering it, no doubt because it was so closely linked with a personal disaster. I could not sleep the night before; I was trying to find some middle ground between awe of the aliens and patriotic suspicion of their motives. Sometime after midnight I got out of bed. I must have woken Nicole as I prowled around the house; she came out into the kitchen to fix us both some hot cocoa. I was sorry to have disturbed her but glad for the company.
"Nervous?" she said.
I shrugged. If I admitted it to her I would have to admit it to myself.
She set a steaming cup in front of me. "I heard someone on the telelink saying today that it's going to take more than a press conference to make up for what they've done wrong already. He said that we shouldn't be listening to them, they should be
listening to us."
"Morris. He's an asshole."
"Still, most people act as if they know everything just because they have starships. What if they don't? Maybe what you should do is get up and ask them who's buried in Grant's Tomb? They'd never figure it out." She chuckled. "You'd go down as the man who stumped the aliens."
"Go down, all right." Still, it was worth a smile at three o'clock in the morning. "Let's talk about something else."
She sipped her cocoa. "Terry called today. She's been asked to join the central council of the Brides of Christ. She doesn't know whether she wants to take the vows or not."
"That idiot. What she needs is a real man to sleep with, not a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus."